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Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that AI truly is able to automate away basically all software development. Any oversight currently performed by humans can itself be done by agents.

...don't you think the ability to create virtually unlimited amounts of software, at virtually no cost, is going to lead to major advances in robotics? I realize there's a lot of very hard problems involved in e.g. robotic hands (to take one example), but once software development is practically free, I'd expect a lot of seemingly-impossible problems to get resolved by the sheer quantity of what we can create and experiment with.

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Yeah, but manufacturing things takes materials and time; I'd give it at least a few years before we manage to squeeze people out of that too.

The robots are going to be controlled by the same billionaires that make employees pee in bottles or fire hundreds on a whim over tweets.

Our labor power is going to be fully eroded and the robots will not be serving us.

That's not really the point I'm trying to make.

In the future, do bathrooms need to be cleaned? If yes, is it cheaper for that to be done by a person or by a robot?

Obviously, it is in the interest of the robot manufacturers to make the robot just a tiny bit cheaper than the person, so you'll buy the robot and the company makes the maximum amount of profit.

Now, if society breaks down and there's no one to consider buying the robot—well, that's not good for anybody, which is why I suspect society will find some way of working this out even if it's not ideal. But whatever, I don't particularly want to argue this point.

What I do want to argue is that there probably isn't a universe in which all white collar work goes away but blue collar work is still around.

> I suspect society will find some way of working this out

Not sure what this "society" that works things out is, exactly. Top-down high-modernist plans for how society ought to work are the past; chaotic, twitchy, thrashy responses to disruption by a tiny elite class is where we are now.

Again, this is really not the point I'm trying to make! If your prediction is that we'd end up in some apocalyptic dystopia, I'll concede the possibility.

But there still wouldn't be any jobs cleaning toilets, because the people who still had toilets to clean would have robots to do it.

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